QLogic has landed another major partnership in the Fibre Channel switch market with today’s announcement that its enterprise-class 5800V Series of 8Gbps Fibre Channel stackable switches will be sold through EMC’s Select program.
QLogic’s (QLGC) 5800V Series of stackable switches have been qualified through the EMC (EMC) E-Lab with a range of EMC storage platforms, including Symmetrix V-Max, Symmetrix DMX, Clariion CX4 and AX4, and the Celerra NS line of unified storage systems.
QLogic’s secret sauce is its inter-switch link (ISL) technology, which provide high-performance, dedicated switch-to-switch connectivity without consuming user ports.
Each switch includes 24 ports – 20 user ports, plus four high-speed 10Gbps or 20Gbps Fibre Channel stacking ports – and includes an Adaptive Trunking feature that automatically pools bandwidth from multiple inter-switch links into a single Virtual Lane – without extra license fees or manual configuration.
The EMC partnership is the second major win for QLogic in the past several weeks. The company struck a similar partnership with Hewlett Packard last month under which HP is now selling its own branded versions of QLogic’s 5800V and 5802V switches (see “HP to resell QLogic’s enterprise FC switches”).
Though EMC has sold QLogic’s networking products in the past, today’s deal marks the first formal agreement between the two companies. To date, the relationship has consisted of “one-off” product deals, according to QLogic.
“This is the first time we have been through…the EMC Select program through a formal agreement, and it will help us move higher into the enterprise than we have in the past,” says Jesse Parker, vice president and general manager of QLogic’s Network Solutions Group.
The 5800V Series will be available from EMC and its partners on April 12.
In addition to the 5800V Series, QLogic’s 3810 entry-level 8Gbps Fibre Channel switches, 5602 4Gbps Fibre Channel stackable switches, and Enterprise Fabric Manager software suite are also now available from EMC.